“... No one recovers from the sadomasochism of their childhood. We may not want to think of the relations between parents and children as power relations: indeed it may sound like a perversion of parenting to do so. And we don’t want to think of parents and children being in any way sexually gratified by their status in relation to each other ...”

“... their ability to reason, appraise, act and participate. Seeing people in terms only of their needs may give us a rather meagre view of humanity.To use a medieval distinction, we are not only patients, whose needs demand attention, but also agents, whose freedom to decide what to value and how to pursue it can extend far beyond the fulfilment of our needs. The ...”

“... is going on. First, there is a diligent detailed realism, essential in spite of whatever Pellerin may say. Time, place, action, clothes, food, dialogue and much more are reported – recreated – with impeccable, mildly obsessive care. Second, this approach is frequently, subtly invaded by moments of subjectivity or impressionism: we are seeing not what an ...”

“... her holy presence, not to listen to the once volatile, trance-inducing music. Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in 1974 Smith (née Smith), who turns seventy this year, has had just one hit single (‘Because the Night’ in 1978, co-written with Bruce Springsteen) in forty years, and the only one of her 11 albums with an unassailable reputation is ...”

“... dead lie round’, surely he is suggesting that the wisdom here isn’t just a worldly wisdom, but may contain something more. What is the difference, then, between this ‘someone’ of Larkin’s with ‘a hunger in himself to be more serious’ and the voice at the end of ‘Little Gidding’ who states: ‘We shall not cease from exploration’? Poets have ...”

“... initially as sure-footed and commanding as the self-serving and misleading account by his brother Robert suggests. Kennedy’s dramatic televised announcement of the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba was ‘designed to divert attention from his private belief (and that of Defence Secretary Robert McNamara) that the ...”

“... to the funfair Disneyland and, ultimately, the educational park Disneyworld. (George, unlike Walt, may live to see his academy: he’s still under 40.) Like Disney, Lucas has a special relationship with the child and, like Disney again, he has the knack of treating his largely adult audiences as boys and tomboys without offending their dignity. (Although more ...”

“... again, only Herbert comes into precise comparison, Popish prelates and Dissenters not qualifying. Robert Herrick has three mentions, but his poetic genius is too lofty to arouse envy: one can but read with haunted admiration the deceptively innocent lyrical outpourings from his Devonshire vicarage. John Donne, the greatest of the deans of St ...”

“... he let me know that he didn’t appreciate my pun. The English, you see, have no sense of humour. Robert Lewis of St James’s Street, ‘the most beautiful cigar shop’, does not for all that escape a little mockery. ‘If the salesman feels you are truly worthy,’ says the magazine You, ‘you might be invited downstairs to the basement.’ ‘They also ...”

“... of their kind or jewels of their country. Many of them are American: Whitman, Stevens, Ashbery, Robert Lowell, Berryman, Cummings, and I suppose Auden. The English are Larkin and Betjeman. Russians and other foreigners include Pushkin, Blok, Gogol, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Nabokov, Canetti, Milosz and Popa. The only difference I see between ...”

“... an Information Review Task Force headed by a senior counterintelligence officer, Brigadier General Robert Carr, which studied the impact of the revelations and sought to produce a list of people who might have been killed because of the information the cables contained. Carr later described the extent of his task force’s failure, in testimony given at ...”

“... have aliens in and carry endorsements from China Miéville; others are alien-free and endorsed by Robert Macfarlane. He has fans who’ve read all the science fiction but not Climbers (1989), his semi-autobiographical masterpiece about rock climbing in the North of England, and fans who are effusive about Climbers but won’t go near the sci-fi. It’s not ...”

“... life-in-its-time is of more interest than her work. These days biography sells, and we may be moving to a point where fiction is seen to be no more than a useful biographical resource. Blackwood’s Lady-Carolineness, her unhappy childhood, busy sex life, connections to major figures in art and literature, and gaudy drinking does make her a ...”

“... and was framed in response to that immediate context, in particular the posthumous publication of Robert Filmer’s patriarchalist theory of government. Since then, authorial intent and context have been the central preoccupations of the Cambridge School and its leading proponent, Quentin Skinner, whose recent retirement from the Regius chair at Cambridge ...”

“... wrote it. But do they actually do this? I suggest that they skip what is not worth reading, and it may be that they have cultivated the art of skipping to their profit; but most people haven’t: it is surely better that they should have their skipping done for them by someone of taste and discrimination. Here’s a paragraph Maugham struck from the first ...”